About Me

I am an activst and journalist. I call 'em the way I see 'em...from the facts, just the facts. I believe that life is to be experienced, with lessons to be learned; I believe in freedom with justice, and I believe that we are here to help each other, not to trample on each other.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

The late Marvin Gaye once sang a beautiful and on-point song in the late 1960s asking us all to stop, take pause and look at what was going on around us.

We are now at a time very similar in tone socially, economically, and politically to those times, as well as the world from 1919-1939. People are attacking each other at rallies, we've got a John Birch-type movement fanning the flames of ignorance and hatred and getting away with it, and we have people so polarized from each other that fistfights are breaking out at the dinner table.

What the hell is going on?

Our country was founded on freedom with responsibility. We simply do NOT have the right to hate each other, however. I think the original signers of the Declaration of Independence and the framers of our Constitution are flipping in their graves as if on a Tilt-A-Whirl at what we are coming to. What we have now is NOT at all what they had in mind then.

When the forefathers sailed to this country, they fled religious persecution and intolerance, as well as the inability to be able to speak freely and run their own lives as they saw fit. They wanted to be able to have their own religions. They didn't want the King telling them that they couldn't be Puritan or Catholic. And they wanted CIVIL discourse in their new form of government, a Republic.

This form of government depended on manners in its rules and its policies, as well as the laws it would lay down for the people who trusted them and elected them to be there. Never before in the history of the world had any government represented its own people. This is what made the United States of America unique. It had town, it had state, and it had national levels of government. We WERE and ARE the BEST country in the world.

So why are we trying to blow it on people who just DON'T get it? We were founded on CIVILITY. The Constitution is there to keep us away from ourselves. There are those who would treat it as mere toilet paper. The Glenn Becks, the Sarah Palins, the Rush Limbaughs, the Sean Hannitys and the Jim DeMents of the world would like to see some of its very core elements torn down. They encourage civil disobedience and some, such as Rand Paul, encourage violence. Tea Partiers brought guns to health care hearings during the summer of 2009.

Americans need to look at themselves. We have had people call our current administration "fascist" and even "Hitlerian." There have been protests where some of our more distinguished African-American leaders have been even spat upon. Our President has been depicted with a Hitler moustache on billboards.

The current level of Tea Party violence actually reminds this author, an historian of the world from 1919-1948, of pre-WWII Nazi jackboot violence, which was indeed brutal. The Nazis started smearing everything from the previous era, and history no longer existed, except to be rewritten. As our friends on Fox News would have it, that would be the perfect world.

Let history be a warning to those who sit silently by this mid-term. We have to look at ourselves, America. We need to wake up. There will NOT be another chance. There is a dark mood in America right now, and we need to ask ourselves, "What's going on?"

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

My God--the worst has finally happened. Someone has finallly killed in the name of anti-government hysteria and Amerika. It's just mind-boggling and astounding that the shrillness of the voices and insanity of the Michelle Bachmanns and Sarah Palins of Amerika have reached the ears of some monster. Those ears have heard and seen the "You lie" so eloquently expressed by Joe Wilson, seconded by the smirks of his colleagues, and the rants and tirades of the Glenn Becks and the incitements of Rush Limbaugh, who are in it for the multi-millions they will make for their corporate sponsors and themselves. Do you think they really care what they say? Nah. They won't lose any sleep over it. They'll just say it's someone who took matters too far and too seriously and flew over the edge into madness.

Mr. Bill Sparkman seems to be the kind of guy who was just doing his day job, tyring to keep a roof over his head, gas in the car and food in his belly, and meets someone who would have an Obama sign with a Hitler moustache or something like that.

When they catch the person responsible for this heinous act, he will get the best the government this country offers -- its justice system.

Too late for Mr. Sparkman.

Just doing head counts was his penalty. The killer meted out his own unfair justice system.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Mr. Wilson Insults Washington

by Dorothy Durio Collins

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.Car.) has really gone and showed them all up. The rooster has crowed, the chicks are running around and the arrogance level has been raised to the hilt when it comes to Republican political sideshows in Washington.

Not only did he call President Barack Obama a liar during a major policy speech, but he had the audacity to then "apologize" for the remark and then fishtail out of it and brag that he had done so. On "Fox News Sunday," he said to anchor Chris Wallace, "I have apologized already to the President, he has accepted that apology; but I will not be silent and I will continue to represent the American people against this..fraud." It was the best non-apology I have ever seen.

Uhm, but excuse me, Mr. Wilson, I'm an American. I didn't vote for you, I don't live in South Carolina, and you don't anywhere near represent what I believe and what almost 65 percent of the voting, thinking public of this country think as well. Do you think yourself so important that you had to make an ass of yourself in front of millions of Americans on TV?

Some are dismissive about your outburst. Your naysayers give you a pass by pointing out that the Parliament and House of Commons in England are raucus; Italians a little more so; Philipinos have to have armed police at the door to keep order; and the Taiwanese just plain old fight.

We in this country, until recently, had a measure of civility about us. SO just beacuse these other countries have these problems don't just give us a pass. I'm not talking about Bush "Family Values," whatever the hell those were, I mean treating each other like we would ourselves. Those days passed after John McCain and Sarah "Deer In the Headlights" Palin opened the door to hate-mongering (racism is what it's called) in October and early November of 2008. I hated to see my country go down the john.

I get so sick and tired of the vitriole that comes out of the mouths of Sarah Palin, Barbara Bachman and Rush Limbaugh, just to name a few. The problem with them is that they have overstepped the line between genius and madness and they actually believe what they say. I don't believe that I have ever heard Sarah Palin finish a sentence. Nor have I heard Rush Limbaugh back up any statement he has made with a cold, hard piece of paper that can be looked upon on the internet or a library. Plus, Limbaugh makes money doing what he does, so he has the impetus to lie. You have to pay to make a comment on his website, so it's fans only, please.

The bad thing is the folks they appeal to are the folks who have the most to lose politically. They are the ones who will be on the back-end of the "Just Say NO!" movement because they believe what these people tell them. They are like lambs to the slaughter under the personal ambitions of a few. The 75,000 who were on the Mall this past Saturday were there at the behest of Limbaugh and Fox News; I don't believe there was a single sign that protested the same thing. But the underlying tone, I believe, was "racism."What these poor folks DON'T realize is that they've been outsmarted. They've been outwitted by people who will say anything to make a buck. It's their damned job to come up with using word like "I hope he FAILS" or "I think he's a Nazi" or such other ridiculous non-sequiturs. They think this stuff is real. Believe me, it isn't. I haven't heard of a black Nazi--remember what happened when Jesse Owens showed Adolf Hitler what a non-Aryan could do at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin?

I knew in November the Republican Right had taken it too far already when my daughter phoned me on Election Night and just tore me one end up the other because Obama had won, calling me an "n-lover," a racist, a "Nazi" and any other thing she could think of. They got to her. The 21-plus years of affection and love-thy-neighbor I had taught her had been completely undone by one year of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and most of all, Sarah Palin, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. I had to hang up on her. It made me sick to my stomach and I cried for several days.

So when you think it's funny that Wilson called Pres. Obama a liar, think again. If you want your country to be the in-your-face, aggressive, angry, pathological country that we've seen come out of the closet this past few years, make Joe Wilson, Rush Limbaugh, or Sarah Palin your role model.

Or you can take the path of least resistance, live in peace, and look to the good guys who ARE trying to make a difference -- the Olympia Snows, the Sonia Sotomayors, the Jimmy Carters, the Barack Obamas.

It takes too damn much energy to be so angry all the time. Perhaps Mr. Wilson and the far right will figure this out before they kill us all.